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The fog was so thick this morning driving my daughter to school, I had to roll the windows down because children, parents everywhere, on bikes, walking, joggers, cars without lights on in intersections. I thought about how many mornings I woke up in a swirl of fog, a fog of my own making. How limited my vision was, how radically much I could not see around me. How apathetic I was to that limited vision. It wasn’t that I didn’t care like some sociopath, I just couldn’t even access that compassion. Why? Because I couldn’t access compassion for myself and if I don’t have compassion for myself—which to me means love in spite of flaws, love the whole even the flaws, more love because of the flaws—how can I have compassion for my family, my neighborhood, my country, my planet? It starts here and it may sound like an over-simplification to you but not for this girl. It made me put down the thing that was blocking me from my self-compassion, blocking me from me.

A beverage.

When the breakdown is this simplistic, the choice is stupidly obvious. “You mean that if I stop drinking this one beverage, I can clear this fog and access love for myself and a possibility that that love could potentially heal one tiny crack in this severely broken planet?”